The Writings of the Venerable Bede is available now! Read selections from his History, educational treatises, biblical commentaries, homilies, poems, letters, and even a few riddles, all in facing-page translation. Link below ⬇️⬇️

The senses in Old English: ġesihþ - sight hlyst - hearing swæcc - taste stenċ - smell hrepung - touch The word for taste, swæcc, could actually refer to taste and smell, and Ælfric specifies “swæcc of þām mūðe” (taste from the mouth) when listing the senses.

Had a great time talking Beowulf and Old English music with Farya Faraji today. Link below ⬇️

The Roman Empire in Old English was ‘sē Rōmānisca Cāserdōm’ - that would have become ‘*the Roomonish Cozerdom’ in Modern English. Sometimes I am actually grateful for the Norman conquest.

Last point on this - There was a feminine substantive, ‘víking,’ in Old Norse, meaning a voyage, which seems to be what causes the confusion here (the same substantives existed in Old English, and that -ing became our gerund). But the distinction here is important; a person being called a víkingr had nothing to do with the existence of the substantive, and the two -ing suffixes have totally separate meanings. We do not call them ‘Vikings’ because of the víking substantive

I should clarify; the reason ‘viking’ is not a verb (you cannot ‘go viking’) is because the -ing here means ‘belonging to,’ and has nothing to do with the -ing in ‘walking.’ So, a Viking was a vik-(bay, inlet)-dweller. Etymologically, the word is not a gerund. Not a verb.

‘Viking is actually a verb’ has to be one of the funniest misconceptions in medieval linguistics (mostly because it’s usually issued condescendingly as a ‘correction’). Do these people also think ‘earthling’ is a verb? What about ‘gelding’? ‘shilling’? The town name ‘Reading’?

The metrical structure of the poem Beowulf, which at times can seem almost infinitely complicated, has given scholars immense headaches over the past 150 years, leading to extremely creative solutions. Here is an excerpt from a new one, from Minkova and Hayes. Clear as day?

He fits in well here!

One of my favorite instances of cross-lingual reinterpretation is the Old English treatment of the Numidian king Jugurtha. In the Orosius translation, we see the name spelled as “Ġeōweorða,” which would mean ‘long ago + honored’ in Old English.